** WARNING: The following is a long post concerning geeky internet nostalgia, philosophy and technological predictions. This is a total nerd alert! ***

You know what I miss? The "wild west" that used to be the "World Wide Web". Remember that term? World Wide Web. It seems almost archaic now. A term that is now destined to join the junkyard that BBS, USENET, IRC, & even AOL were tossed to years ago. Along these same lines, I got to thinking about how Myspace, Facebook, Wikipedia, IMDB, and YouTube have successfully destroyed what was, at one time, truly a "world wide web".

Now don't get me wrong... the aforementioned websites are truly wonders of the modern age and I don't know how I would function on a daily basis without them. Unfortunately though they have destroyed the internet that I used to love as a teenager. My case in point:

Go to Google and type a few random keywords of interest. For the sake of 90's nostalgia, let's say you type "Married... with Children". What turns up? Something along these lines (not in exact order, but you get the idea):

1. IMDB
2. Wikipedia
3. Official Site
4. Wiki-Quotes
5. Hulu (full episodes)
6. YouTube (clips with screenshots)
7. Amazon
8. Various Newspapers

Now all those sites will successfully turn up every last piece of information on "Married with Children"... from casts, to episodes guides, trivia, full episodes, and merchandise for purchase. I remember back in the day... back when Webcrawler was the world's first real widely-used search engine... and the sites that would pop up would be from all different sources from all different walks of life. Now, I'm not necessarily complaining... because obviously the current system consolidates all that information into just a few sources... but still... isn't it a little boring to get all the info on the entire internet from the same sources for every search query?

They say the internet is growing at a rapid rate - even doubling in size every few years. But I often wonder if the number of unique websites is shrinking at the same rate. Does anyone measure that? I think it wasn't that long ago that Wikipedia (9.25 million articles @ 1.74 billion words throughout 250 languages) surpassed the ancient Chinese Yongle (11,095 volumes consisting of 50 million characters) as the largest encyclopedia in the history of humanity. But then how many websites became useless as a result of Wikipedia's inherent growth?

Now I'm not necessarily complaining. I'm just noting how standardized the web has become. The one thing I do truly miss about the current state of the web is the death of the personal web page at the hands of Myspace & Facebook.

Who remembers Geocities? Come on, I know you all have to remember geocities. It was from an era when anyone could get a little free web space and put whatever they heck they wanted on the Internet. It could be a personal web page, it could be a "shrine" to their favorite movie, a collection of random trivia & games, or just a lot of pointless garbage. Needless to say, it was a lot of fun. Sure, it required people to construct their own pages from scratch... but it was just so interesting. Myspace and Facebook have all but standardized anything the average person would want to put on a web page.

In fact, going back to my "Married... with Children" example. In the first 60 entries to be displayed during my Google query, only TWO of them are what I would consider "personal web pages" (one of which is a Geocities site that hasn't been updated in 8 1/2 years... ha!). In a lot of ways, I find this disappointing. But perhaps I'm just getting old fashioned with my technological age.

While I'm at it, I'm going to make a few technological predictions for the next 5-10 years. Some of these you might not have considered... and some of these could probably get me in trouble at my job if they knew I felt this way. Assuming these companies stay on their current paths, I'm pretty comfortable with the following predictions:

1. Microsoft's significance in the computer world will suffer significantly. Possibly even going the way of AOL...

2. Myspace will lose all profitability. It will turn into an idle wasteland and will eventually shutdown. Facebook will flourish indefinitely.

3. Cell phone companies will be the power players during "Web 3.0".

It would take me all day to completely explain my reasoning but here are my feelings in a nutshell:

When it comes to Microsoft, they're about to approach an unfortunate reality. The personal computer - for the most part - already does what people want it to do. For years, people were waiting for computers to get "faster & more advanced" so that they could do things "faster" and... well... be "more advanced" about it. That's no longer the case. The technology has finally caught up with the consumer demand. That, my friends, is why Vista has been such a failure... it requires consumers to buy more powerful hardware in order to use new features that consumers don't feel they don't necessarily need. It would be like emptying your bank account to put an addition on a house that you already feel is a little too large. Sure, it's nice to have... but it's not worth breaking the bank when what you already have more than suits your need. When the much anticipated Windows 7 is released in 370 days, I think we'll know if my prediction is on course. My guess is that it will receive good reviews... especially as people race to replace (or skip over completely) Windows Vista. But unless it offers something that consumers feel they "have to have", it will ultimately be the start of Microsoft's decline.

As far Myspace, I think it's fairly obvious... Facebook is far better at being "social" and it's far better at being a "network". In fact, it's the "network" part that makes Facebook so superior. The fact that you can log on to facebook every 30 seconds and see a different home screen based on what other users are doing is proof enough. Plus, the uses beyond just sharing personal information are abundant. It's great for work, it's great for sharing ideas, it's great for classes, it's great for planning events and parties, you can design custom programs to harness the network's power and accessibility to do just about anything, etc etc etc. The list goes on. I've logged into my Myspace almost everyday the last 6 months and I don't think more than 5 things have changed. I feel like I'm on a deserted island. While I think the "Music" section is keeping it afloat... I don't think it's surprising that I see my friend count dropping daily... as my Facebook friend count rises practically by the minute.

Lastly, just as consumer demand is dropping for Microsoft in the PC market, the OPPOSITE is happening in the mobile device market. In fact, I would say cell phones are currently like what PC's were in 1995 (with the iPhone being the equivalent of a Pentium II machine running Windows 95). People WANT them to do more and more and more but they're not quite capable of doing them up to our standards. We want full web access with fully rendered web pages. We want to be networked. And we want it all to happen FAST. LIGHTNING. FAST. And really... is there not a person out there who doesn't believe that completely wireless internet access will be the eventual future? I mean really... WiFi will inevitably die... and the entire Internet will "just exist" sort of like how radio signals "just exist". And when that happens... it's going to put the cell phone carriers in the power seat.

Damn. My fingers hurt from typing. I had this whole string of ideas the other night before I went to bed and I couldn't help but share them here.

I'm curious to see how it will all turn out.